topographics – Page 5 – Thought Factory

architecture, colour, digital, roadtrip, topographics

roadtrip to Wallaroo

April 18, 2016

The second step in the roadtrip with an 8×10 has just taken place. It was to Wallaroo on the Yorke Peninsula. On this occasion I built on the first roadtrip to the Coorong by camping instead of renting a house and linking up with Gilbert Roe, a fellow photographers from Adelaide, instead of being on my own. He is the only photographer that I know in Adelaide who is interested in exploring South Australia, doing road trips, camping and photographing.

Although I digitally scoped some agricultural landscapes of the Yorke Peninsula, and the older style beach shacks at Wallaroo’s North Beach the large format photography on this roadtrip was centred around the Vittera silos at Wallaroo:

silo, Wallaroo

I’ve been searching for historical precedents for Australian photographers doing roadtrips along the lines of Americans such as Robert Frank, Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld who extended the tradition of chronicling roadside America that was initiated by Walker Evans in the 1930s. Continue Reading…

colour, digital, history, landscape, ruins, topographics

at Lake Albert

April 10, 2016

After attending the Centre of Culture, Land and Sea’s informative workshop at Meningie in South Australia. I used the opportunity to explore around Lake Albert and the Narrung Peninsula with its legacy of settler agriculture before driving on down to Salt Creek for a photoshoot for the Edgelands project.

Lake Albert, along with Lake Alexandrina, is a part of the Lower Lakes of the River Murray, and is adjacent to the northern lagoon’s eco-system of the Coorong. Being at the bottom end of the highly engineered River Murray, Lake Albert suffers from the river’s minimal environmental flows. Those at the terminus of the River Murray receive what is left over after consumptive use in the Murray-Darling Basin.

Though the Barrages at Goolwa were constructed to maintain the Lakes as freshwater systems at a constant water depth, the Lakes/Coorong region is at the end of a major river systems, which means that this region is highly sensitive to changes in freshwater flows. Despite the Basin Plan, which has addressed the overallocation of water from the Basin’s rivers by irrigated agriculture, not enough fresh water currently flows into Lake Albert to flush the lake out, so it is salty, and all the contaminants from the upper part of the river end up in Lake Albert.

Lake Albert, South Australia

The irrigators around Lake Albert suffered from a lack of water during the Millennium Drought (from 2002- 2010)—-when Lake Albert was closed off from natural river flows by a Government constructed band at the entrance top the Lake. Exposure and oxidation of acid sulfate soils due to falling water levels from 2007-2009 in the Lower River Murray and Lower Lakes also resulted in acidification of soils, lake and ground water. The low water levels on Lake Albert resulted in many of the dairy farmers, who had relied on pumped water from Lake Albert, being forced to sell their cattle and even abandon their dairy farms. Continue Reading…

history, landscape, nature, topographics

Land Dialogues

March 23, 2016

There is a forthcoming conference on Land Dialogues at the Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga, NSW, Australia. It is an interdisciplinary approach to place/space and human/non-human convergence discourses. The conference blurb says that this involves the following themes:

(1) Analysis or application of existing or emergent dialogues with land in indigenous, pre-colonial, post-colonial and anti-colonial contexts.(2) Explorations of the limits (or perceived limits) of sustainment principles, sustainabilities, ecologies and agriculture.(3) New/Old Frontiers, Land and the Digital and explorations of, or reflections on potentials for new topographies including data visualisations in relationship to land. (4) Experimental or experiential works or non-standard items including exhibition or performance towards dialogue with land.

Theme (4) includes a photographic exhibition that is curated by James Farley entitled Land Dialogues – Contemporary Australian Photography (in Dialogues with Land). The Photographers involved include Christine McFetridge, Kate Robertson, Renata Buziak, James Farely, Chris Orchard, Jacob Raupach, Felix Wilson, Carolyn Young and Amy Findlay. However, it is unclear what kind of dialogue with the land these photographers are engaged in since there is no curatorial statement online apart from the general statement that photographers involved are exploring and reevaluating how the Australian community identifies, represents and values the spaces that we create and occupy. Surprisingly, there no abstracts of the conference papers online.

Currently we have a vacuum about the nature of dialogues with nature in contemporary photography within the gallery system that was once premised on the modernist divide of nature and culture as mutually exclusive. Nature was landscape rather than country, and nature existed in a repressed state in the galleries through the 1980s and early 1990s. So what kind of dialogues with nature are happening in the second decade of the 21st century, given that agricultural industrialisation, which was an early cornerstone of Australian modernity, has left us with parched catchment areas, salt encrusted soil and degraded rivers?

My own work in the Edgelands project —here and here —-can be considered to be a dialogue with the land as opposed to country. This image of the Murrumbidgee River near Hay is an example:

Murrumbidgee River

The Murrumbidgee River runs through Wagga Wagga and it is the second largest source of water flows into the Murray-Darling system. The 1,600 km long river is ranked as one of the two least ecologically healthy of 23 tributary rivers in the Basin. Lake Burley Griffin, which is a part of the upper Murrumbidgee, is pretty much a fetid carp pond. By the mid 1970s, almost all of the water in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area had been allocated to irrigators, and today we are seeing an example of river system collapse with the signs of an ecological disaster are all too clear.

architecture, landscape, topographics

at Andamooka

March 14, 2016

The blurb for Lars Heldmann’s fascinating ouThere photography exhibition at the South Coast Regional Art Gallery (Old Goolwa Police Station) of the mining towns and landscapes in and around Roxby Downs , Andamooka and Cooper Pedy in northern South Australia says that the images in the exhibition “give us access to the remote and vast interior, which is in contrast to our living environment along the coast and interior waters.” It is an interesting attempt to uncover the missing narratives of our regional pastas well as a search for things that many of us in Adelaide did not know existed. The art works of this region are few and far between. I know of no reclamation art that has been produced by the visual arts community, or any rehabilitation work done by landscape architects.

The ouThere exhibition reminded me of my images of Andamooka. So I went back to the archive and had a look at the images that were probably made around the beginning of the 21st century. We spent several days at Andamooka, but we never took the opportunity to go on to explore Lake Torrens National Park to the east, nor drive north to Marree, which is at the junction of the Oodnadatta Track and the Birdsville Track. The reason was that we were tourists, travelling in a little Ford Laser, without access to a 4 wheel drive.

petrol pump, Andamooka

The odd image from my Andamooka work has made its way into the Regional Landscapes: South Australia and Edgelands portfolios.

I didn’t see this part of South Australia as the unknown or the Australian Outback. People live and work here. For instance, the nearby town of Woomera was a military town, whilst Roxby Downs and Andamooka are mining landscapes and towns –industrial and pre-industrial. Andamooka, at that time, was more or less, a declining shanty town with abandoned mining shafts, since the opal field was mined out during the 1970’s. There was little sign of the Aboriginal people who would have had a long-standing connection with the area. Continue Reading…

architecture, colour, film, topographics

silo, Cowangi, Mallee Highway

October 29, 2015

I’ve finally scanned the medium format negatives from the scoping I did for the silo project whilst I was returning to Adelaide from the Canberra trip, as well as those made in the Wimmera when I was returning to Adelaide from being at the Ballarat International Foto Biennale. This project evokes the solitary road trip and cross-country journeys, as a working model of photography without the 35mm “grab-shot” style that captured flux and contradictions of modern life with a fresh immediacy. It is a winter project, given the summer heat in the Mallee.

This is an image of a silo at Cowangie, in the Victorian part of the Malle Highway made with an old, mechanical handheld Rolleiflex SL66. The picture that I also made whilst I was scoping with the digital camera at the same time can be seen here.

silo, Cowangie, Mallee Highway

This photography of contemporary, rural Australian Mallee is in the topographical style–an Australian topographics. It is how I would make the picture in black and white using the 8×10 Cambo monorail: straight on to the object, with cloud cover, gentle light and some context to the landscape. I wish that I ‘d taken the picture with the 8×10 then and there; but at the time when I was in the field, I wasn’t sure of the right perspective to adopt. Hence the number of different interpretations I made with a digital camera. I then had to see them on the computer screen to be able to judge which of the various interpretations was the most appropriate.

The photograph endeavours to avoid being nostalgic about the Australian Mallee and its fading small farm past to concentrate more on the object. It is akin to the work of Brend and Hilla Becher, with their connection to Minimalism and Conceptual Art and their systematic series or typologies industrial architecture. Their pictures of the architecture (eg., coal bunkers and pit heads) showed a resource industry that was visibly defunct and dying, instead of the glimpses of hope of a thriving, developing nation that was evident in the 1970s American New Topographics.
Continue Reading…

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